Your Tax Dollars Gone Wild

Apparently, the Justice Department started an Obscenity Prosecution Task Force last year. Yep. While the so-called Global War on Terror is such an emergency that we're supposed to sacrifice our most essential freedoms so we can "win" it, we apparently need to make sure no one looks at nudie mags or dirty DVDs too, or else the terrorists win.

According to The Nation, the leader of this task force is one Brent Ward. Mr. Ward has apparently been bugging the crap out of USAs (US Attorneys) to try to get them to prosecute flimsy cases involving consensual porn involving only consenting adults. This while, as one USA is quoted as saying,

"There were countless child obscenity cases crying out to be prosecuted," the
source told me, "but [Brent] Ward wanted to focus on cases involving consenting
adults. That's just not a good way of dedicating resources. When you have so
many children being harmed, why not allocate your resources towards that?"

Jeez, I thought it was all about protecting the children. Apparently not if an adult is watching adults having consensual sex.

In any case, failure to prosecute some of these bullshit "obscenity" cases is now being floated as one of the reasons that some of the USA 8 were dismissed. Despite the fact that the dismissals took place before Ward complained to Justice about those failures.

But this isn't an obvious sop to the religious right. No.

But the best part of the article, for me, is this little gem about our friend Brent Ward. When he was a USA himself in Utah, he -- and I am not making this up -- tried to force nude art models to wear bikinis. That's right. Nude art models. Wearing bikinis. Nude art models posing in... well, the nude ... was important enough on the agenda of a freakin' US Attorney for him to use the full power of the Federal government to stop it.

Nude. Art. Models.

That this disgrace has any position in the government, frankly, is a travesty, as is wasting money and resources on an Obscenity Task Force dedicated to taking resources away from prosecuting child porn to go after consensual adult porn.

Will this regime never stop finding new ways to sap my will to live?